So I am planning a vacation to see my favorite baseball team do some spring training in a couple months. After a couple days of watching Hotwire.com, I started to wonder about the identities of the hotels which I'm looking at.. that thought led me here. I was wondering how far sites like Hotwire go when it comes to keeping their hotels secret. Certainly they change the amenities we see (this is evident from the multiple sets some hotels have on your lists) but is there any evidence to suggest that they might change star levels based on whats available in the chosen market? These days, organizations like Mobil or AAA seem to have been made irrelevant by these companies which have devise their own ranking systems. Other people on this forum seem to say that Hotwire inflates their rankings somewhat... is Priceline more conservative? I've never used any of these websites before, and I want to make sure that I'm not being misled... I certainly understand that paying the depressed price requires an assumption of a certain amount of risk... but are we at the mercy of an algorithm's whim at any given time when we search Hotwire?
